Microsoft Office 365 Upgrade

Office 365 Productivity and Collaboration Tools available to Kent State Faculty and Staff

As technologies change, new tools are continually introduced to improve how individuals and teams perform work. The issue often arises that areas adopt different tools to perform essentially the same function. Efficiency and productivity improve within the individual areas but become disjointed across the institution.

The Division of Information Technology recently expanded the university’s Microsoft agreement to include additional productivity and collaboration tools. Faculty and staff throughout the university have been given access to Teams, Planner and other collaborative tools that are integrated with Office 365 (O365). 

Faculty and staff will have access to chat conversations, shared documents, Office applications (such as Word, Outlook and Excel), planning tools, video calls and meetings – all within a single online workspace.

Office 365 Highlights

• Teams serves as a hub for teamwork, providing online access to chats, content, and tools from across O365 into a single workspace. Team members have the ability to work collaboratively within online versions of familiar Office applications, such as Word, Outlook and Excel. In addition, Teams supports video calls and meetings to enable teams to meet live.

• Planner gives teams a visual way to create plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, chat about what they're working on, set due dates, and update status.

• OneDrive offers a single safe place to store all your files and important team project files. It also allows you to work on documents collaboratively with your team.

• Kent State's Training and Outreach offers in-person training sessions at the Library on multiple O365 programs; you can register at training.kent.edu. You can also ask your manager to arrange a training session in your conference or meeting room from our Office 365 Training and Communications Team.